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The young lad cries out as his skull is forcefully gripped, a massive digit digging into his cheek as his father's powerful palm grasps him by the neck. That moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Uffizi Gallery, evoking unease through Caravaggio's chilling portrayal of the tormented child from the scriptural narrative. The painting seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a single twist. However Abraham's preferred approach involves the silvery steel blade he holds in his other palm, ready to cut Isaac's neck. One certain element remains – whoever modeled as the sacrifice for this breathtaking piece displayed remarkable acting ability. There exists not only fear, surprise and begging in his darkened gaze but additionally profound sorrow that a protector could betray him so completely.

He adopted a well-known biblical tale and made it so fresh and visceral that its terrors appeared to unfold directly in view of the viewer

Standing in front of the painting, observers recognize this as a actual face, an accurate record of a young model, because the identical boy – identifiable by his tousled hair and almost dark pupils – features in several other works by the master. In each instance, that richly expressive face commands the scene. In Youth With a Ram, he peers playfully from the shadows while embracing a lamb. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a toughness learned on Rome's alleys, his black plumed wings demonic, a unclothed adolescent creating riot in a well-to-do dwelling.

Amor Vincit Omnia, presently exhibited at a British museum, constitutes one of the most discomfiting artworks ever created. Observers feel totally disoriented gazing at it. Cupid, whose darts fill people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely real, brightly lit nude form, standing over overturned items that comprise stringed instruments, a music manuscript, plate armour and an builder's T-square. This heap of possessions echoes, deliberately, the geometric and architectural equipment scattered across the floor in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic disorder is caused by this smirking deity and the mayhem he can release.

"Affection sees not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid depicted blind," penned the Bard, just prior to this painting was created around the early 1600s. But Caravaggio's god is not blind. He stares straight at the observer. That face – ironic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold assurance as he struts naked – is the same one that screams in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.

As Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio created his three images of the same unusual-appearing youth in the Eternal City at the start of the seventeenth century, he was the highly celebrated sacred painter in a metropolis ignited by religious renewal. The Sacrifice of Isaac reveals why he was commissioned to adorn churches: he could adopt a scriptural story that had been depicted many times before and render it so fresh, so raw and physical that the horror seemed to be occurring directly in front of the spectator.

However there existed a different aspect to the artist, apparent as soon as he arrived in the capital in the winter that concluded the sixteenth century, as a painter in his early 20s with no mentor or patron in the urban center, only skill and audacity. The majority of the works with which he captured the sacred city's eye were everything but holy. What may be the very first hangs in the UK's National Gallery. A youth opens his red mouth in a yell of agony: while stretching out his dirty digits for a fruit, he has instead been attacked. Youth Bitten by a Reptile is eroticism amid poverty: observers can discern Caravaggio's gloomy chamber mirrored in the murky waters of the glass container.

The adolescent wears a rose-colored blossom in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex commerce in Renaissance painting. Venetian painters such as Titian and Jacopo Palma depicted prostitutes grasping blooms and, in a painting lost in the WWII but documented through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female prostitute, clutching a bouquet to her chest. The meaning of all these botanical signifiers is obvious: intimacy for purchase.

How are we to interpret of Caravaggio's sensual depictions of boys – and of one boy in specific? It is a question that has split his commentators since he gained widespread recognition in the twentieth century. The complicated historical truth is that the painter was neither the queer icon that, for example, the filmmaker presented on screen in his twentieth-century film about the artist, nor so completely devout that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a portrait of Christ.

His initial works indeed offer explicit sexual implications, or including offers. It's as if Caravaggio, then a destitute youthful artist, identified with the city's prostitutes, selling himself to live. In the Uffizi, with this thought in consideration, observers might look to another initial creation, the sixteenth-century masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of wine gazes calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black sash of his garment.

A few annums following Bacchus, what could have motivated Caravaggio to create Victorious Cupid for the art patron Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was finally becoming almost respectable with prestigious ecclesiastical commissions? This unholy pagan god revives the sexual challenges of his initial works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Fifty years later, its secret seemed obvious: it was a representation of Caravaggio's lover. A English traveller viewed the painting in about the mid-seventeenth century and was informed its figure has "the physique and countenance of [Caravaggio's|his] own youth or servant that laid with him". The name of this adolescent was Cecco.

The painter had been dead for about 40 annums when this story was documented.